Civic Engagement as a Constraint on Corruption

Corruption is the great disease of government. It undermines the efficiency of the
public sector in many countries around the world. We experimentally study civic
engagement (CE) as a constraint on corruption when incentives are stacked
against providing CE. We show that CE is powerful in curbing corruption when
citizens can encourage each other to provide CE through social approval. Social
approval induces strategic complementarity among conditional cooperators which
counteracts the strategic substitutability (which tends to limit beneficial effects of
CE) built into our design. We also show that civic engagement in the lab is
correlated with civic engagement in the field, and that the effects of social
approval are surprisingly robust to framing in our setting.